Scars
by Delicious Poundcake
Summary: Each of Gary's scars tells a story. No pairings, although you might see shades of Gary/Petey if you're looking through slash goggles!


Gary got his first scar when he was just six years old. It's not a very interesting or noticeable one - and it definitely doesn't even _approach _ the level of badassery as his favourite, the one on his face - but he feels that it's noteworthy simply for being his first. The original. The one that bent him over, took his scar-virginity and didn't call back afterwards.

Well, you get the idea.

It's just a thin, pale little line. A jagged crescent shape nestled just underneath his left knee. Gary had been playing outside in the street (he seems to recall that he was playing jump-rope, to be exact, though he tells people it was soccer), and he tripped and fell over onto a shard of glass from a broken bottle. He remembers the following moments as nothing but a haze of blood; thick red spurts of it erupting violently from his knee and soaking the streets of New Coventry in crimson gore...

Okay, he's willing to admit that his memory might be a _little_ distorted in that regard. What he does recall with absolute clarity, however, is limping home in total hysterics only to find that his parents weren't there. Absolutely convinced that he was going to die or his leg was going to drop off, he'd sat down on his doorstep to wait for them. He was there for _hours_, his childish sobbing slowing to a mere whimper as the blood dried and crusted up on his leg. It had been Miss Abby who noticed him there in the end, and she let him share her walking stick when she took him back to her house to get patched up. A few band-aids and cookies later, Gary had hobbled his way home again feeling much better.

(That's actually why little old ladies are never the target of any of his mischief, you know. He'll happily torture the infirm, the weak, the innocent, the _unbelievably moronic_ - but not white-haired little grandma-types. He'll never admit it, though, because nobody needs to know that Gary Smith actually has _standards.)  
_

His parents had returned by the time he'd got back home, anyway, and he vividly remembers rushing over to his mother so he could show her what had happened to him. His _war wound_, Miss Abby had called it, because he'd been _such a brave young man_. He'd liked that, and his naive little six-year-old brain had expected his mom to treat him like the brave, wounded hero that he felt he was.

_Yeah-fucking-right._

"Go out and play, Gary! Your father and I have more important things to talk about than a silly little cut. Be more careful in future!"

Real motherly. Gary finds it quite irritating that remembering it _still_ makes him feel like shit.

That's his first scar, then: the one that taught him that his parents were good for precisely _fuck all_. An important lesson, neatly recorded in a raggedy white line across his skin. It always reminds him to never rely on anyone for _anything_.

His second scar is even less interesting, in his opinion, than the first. It does _look_ cooler, though. It's an appendectomy scar that runs across part of his lower stomach like a crooked little smile. Like _Gary's_ smile. He's had that one since he was twelve.

He'd just thought that he had a regular stomachache at first. A pretty nasty one, sure, bad enough to keep him out of classes for the day - but certainly not bad enough for him to be worried about it. But when he'd thrown up over his dorm-mate, writhing in pain and sweating, he'd finally admitted that he might possibly actually need to go to the hospital. A little bit. Maybe.

After some tests (one of which involved a doctor prodding him viciously with a finger and asking him if it hurt - Gary had kicked out at the man in reflex, spitting out that _of course it fucking did_), he was scheduled for emergency surgery. He doesn't really remember much between diagnosis and getting his shiny red new scar, but he _does_ remember waking up after the operation and finding that the dorm-mate he'd vomited all over had visited him before his own _parents_ did.

It wasn't all that surprising, though, considering that his parents were useless and his roomie was _Peter Kowalski._ Yes, little Femme-boy Petey, sitting by the hospital bed and looking all pale and serious and Petey-like. He'd brought _flowers_, for fuck's sake. It was like he was _asking_ to become Gary's new favourite punching-bag. Gary was, naturally, only too happy to oblige.

To be honest, he hadn't paid much attention to Petey before that. Yeah, they were room-mates, but Femme-boy was the type of kid who just faded into the background most of the time. His shirts weren't pink then, for one thing. He was quiet, wimpy, unassuming; not as much of an obvious victim as nerds like Pee-Stain Algie. He simply slipped under the radar of most people, Gary included. Not after scar number two, though.

"You're awake? Hi, how are you feel-"

"Hey, are you my nurse? Or my _date? _ What's with the flowers?"

"Huh? No, I'm... It's me. Pete. From school. I just wanted to see if you were okay."

"So if I wasn't, were you going to kiss me better? It'll take more than _flowers_, geez."

"Leave me alone, man, I was just trying to be nice..."

It was funny, really, how that set the tone for most of the two's interactions throughout the years. Gary can't help but smirk remembering it. Some things, like scars, simply don't change.

Well, not without reconstructive surgery or lasers or something, anyway.

Petey was with him when he got his third scar, too - his favourite, the one over his right eye. Gary really isn't the type of person who could give a flying fuck about his appearance, but he likes this scar. It's thoroughly badass, feral, hinting at a darker and more dangerous nature beneath the schoolboy image...

It's quintessentially _Gary_, then, which he supposes is why he likes it so much. Old photographs of him before he got it look wrong now, incomplete somehow. He sometimes gets the urge to take a marker pen and draw the scar onto every picture of him in the older Bullworth yearbooks. Whilst drawing moustaches and glasses onto all the faculty members, of course. No point in making a half-assed job of vandalism, right?

Uh, anyway. Scar number three.

He got it last Halloween, the year before... well, the year before _Hopkins_ showed up and ruined everything. The night had started off well - Gary had got his hands on a set of fifties-style mobster cosumes, one each for himself and Petey. Femme-boy had looked supremely ridiculous in his, with the sleeves hanging loosely below the ends of his fingers and his hat constantly slipping down over his eyes. The fake cigar and bright pink water pistol Gary had given him probably didn't help much either, on reflection. Gary, on the other hand, was armed with a fake plastic tommy-gun and a pocket full of firecrackers. "Only the _big boys_ are allowed real weapons," he'd cackled, and he remembers how Petey made that annoyed little scrunched-up face at him. The _"leave me alone, Gary"_ face. The one that just made him want to pick on the little squirt even _more.  
_

So they'd gone out and done the same things that Bullworth kids do every Halloween: pick on the smaller students while avoiding the bigger ones. Same as every day, really, except it wasn't only the greasers who were dressed like idiots. Gary had been having an absolute blast despite Petey's constant whining about how throwing little kids into the fountain to "sleep with the fishes" was immoral (morals, Gary declared, were _relative)._ So, naturally, when curfew rolled around he wasn't all that enthusiastic about having to go back to the dorms and decided to stay out. The trouble was, as Petey pointed out, everyone else would be going to bed and there'd be nobody to pick on.

The solution, then, was obvious. Their only option was to go and prank the townies.

After threatening and cajoling Petey into accompanying him, they'd biked down to Blue Skies Industrial Park. It didn't take long for them to find a group of townies, all holed up inside one of those little abandoned trailery-cabin things near the power plant. After peering through the window, it became apparent that they were sharing out the night's candy haul.

"They've been trick-or-treating?" Gary was both amused and disgusted. "What are they, five?"

The plan itself had been simple enough. Gary climbed up onto the roof of the cabin as quietly as he could (suprisingly difficult when you're supressing giggles. Manly, _evil_ giggles, naturally), lit a firecracker and dropped it down the cabin's chimney, followed by a stink bomb for good measure. It was a matter of seconds before the townies fled the shack, choking, and then it was up to Petey to lean through the back window and steal their bags of candy.

Except, of course, he messed it up. Never send a Femme-boy to do a _man's_ job.

The squirt took too long fumbling with the window, got spotted and froze up. Kind of like a deer in headlights, as the expression goes, only wussier and with more whimpering. Gary still isn't sure why he didn't just run off and leave Petey to get beaten up - he would've deserved it for fucking up so royally, after all - but he didn't. Instead he jumped off the cabin roof, landed directly on top of the townie who had hold of Pete, threw another stink bomb and ran off cackling, Petey following close behind. It was glorious, and Gary wishes someone had been there to film it so that the townies' disbelieving faces would be captured for all time.

Anyhow, Petey hadn't been able to keep up the running for very long. They'd only been fleeing for a short while when he started wheezing like he was going to _die_ or something. It was so damn typical of Femme-boy to have asthma, wasn't it? _Ugh._ So Gary ducked into an alleyway, smashed one of the windows in the abandoned tenements and shoved Petey through it before jumping through himself.

He realises now that it sounds like he was being all _heroic_ and _noble_ and other such sentiments, but he wasn't. At all. Petey was just the one who had the candy and Gary was hungry, okay?

They'd been silent (Femme-boy puffing away on his inhaler aside) for around fifteen minutes before Gary was sure that the townies had gone. He wasn't certain enough to leave the tenements, but he felt safe enough to talk. "What the fuck happened, moron? All you had to do was open the window!"

He remembers this as the moment when Petey went _green_. Seriously. Until then he'd thought it was just something that happened in cartoons, but nope - Femme-boy had a very definite green tinge to his skin. "G-Gary! What happened to your eye?!"

He honestly hadn't noticed anything was wrong until then. Suddenly aware of the pain in his face, he'd put a hand to his eye and been vaguely surprised to see it come away bloody. He must've been cut when he broke the window, or maybe when he climbed through it afterwards... whatever, it wasn't like it mattered. He remembers being really giddy about it all, cackling to himself as he tried to assess the damage by using a piece of foil as a mirror. Petey was being particularly useless, mumbling something about how much he hated blood. Typical of him to be such a _girl_ about it. He was way more bothered about it than Gary had been, at any rate.

"You _owe_ me for this," Gary had said, never one to pass up an opportunity. "My blood's been spilled to save your sorry ass, Femme-boy. You owe me _big._"

"Gary, just... will you stop _poking_ it like that?"

"You owe me, right, Petey? Or do I have to make it _squelch_ again?"

"Whatever, man, just stop it!"

"Good. Next Halloween, I'm getting you a bunny costume. You'll like that, won't you? Yeah... a fluffy widdle bunny wabbit outfit. A _pink_ one."

No wonder it's his favourite scar. It looks awesome, has a story of supreme townie ass-kickery behind it, and it led to Femme-boy wearing _that_ rabbit costume. It's _perfect_. Not like the newest scar, number four. Gary _hates_ that one, hates it so much that he once honestly considered chopping off his own god damned arm so that he didn't have to look at it any more.

It's an ugly scar. Fresh, too, the skin still shiny-red and puckered in a thick uneven line all the way along his forearm. It's the reason why he no longer wears his sleeves all bunched up around his elbows, instead leaving them long so that they cover up the fucking thing. This scar has a story too, but not one that he's ever had to tell. Everyone in Bullworth already knows the story of Gary "Sociopath" Smith and the school riot, the story that ends with him crashing through a skylight and lying there, defeated and humiliated beyond belief at the feet of Jimmy fucking Hopkins. Practically half the glass from the skylight ended up in Gary's arm, and he's pretty sure that he gathered up the rest of it while being dragged through the debris by his feet.

Like he _really_ needed any further punishment after being defeated by Jimmy, King of Morons. _Seriously.  
_

His only consolation is that nobody needs to ask for that story, considering how infamous it is. It's not something he likes to dwell on, and that's exactly why he hates the scar so much. It's always going to be there, see, and he's never going to be able to look at it without the memories all flooding back. He knows this with absolute certainty. No matter how old he gets, even if he lives to be a hundred years old and completely fucking nuts - he'll catch sight of the scar and instantly be transported back to the floor of Crabblesnitch's office. Just what he needs - a permanent reminder of his lowest moment.

It's not that he regrets what he did, or that he's sorry (he's _Gary Smith_, and he's never sorry for _anything_). It's just infuriating, _sickening_ that he'll never be able to look at his own arm again without remembering that shaven-headed moron. It's... It's like a tattoo, almost. A metaphorical tattoo of Jimmy's stupid gormless face gawping at him. Signed by the artist, misspelled, of course: _Jimmy woz ere.  
_

And actually, with that rather horrifying mental image, he at least knows that things could be worse. _Urgh_.


End file.
